Story
The story of Bran Castle
Outside Romania this is sold as Dracula's Castle, but the real record is clear: there is no evidence that Bram Stoker knew anything about it, his fictional castle looks nothing like it, and most historians agree that Vlad the Impaler never lived here. The claimed link is tourism-driven. The true story is older.
In 1377 King Louis I of Hungary gave the Saxons of Brașov the privilege of building a stone castle here at their own expense, guarding the mountain pass between Transylvania and Wallachia. After 1920 the Saxons gave it to the Romanian royal house, and it became the favourite home of Queen Marie, who had it renovated by the Czech architect Karel Zdeněk Líman. Her daughter, Princess Ileana, ran a hospital here in World War II. The communist regime seized it in 1948, and in 2006 it was returned to Ileana's children.
Today it is a museum of the art and furniture Queen Marie collected.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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